Dropbox Steps Up to Rescue Us From Corporate Software

Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston.  Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Dropbox is going corporate.

On Wednesday, the file-syncing startup launched an application programming interface, or API, that lets outside developers build software on top of its Dropbox for Business service. That may sound like a jumble of tech speak, but it could be very useful to businesses, and ultimately, it represents a kind of finale to a decades-long contest: consumer technology has now emerged triumphant over corporate IT as the way to get work done.

Whether it’s Gmail at work or Apple partnering with IBM to bring iPhones into the office, workers are more and more the ones bringing new software and hardware into the workplace, not sales teams. This hasn’t come without difficulty, as companies struggle to balance the best tool for the job with the tools they can control. But the momentum appears to be irresistible, and the path of Dropbox from consumer convenience to corporate necessity is typical.

“We’re seeing a pull into larger and larger deals and larger and larger customers,” Ilya Fushman, Dropbox for Business’ head of product, tells WIRED. “A lot of this is really addressing the needs of larger and larger organizations.”

Too Simple

Ilya Fushman, head of product, Dropbox for Business  Dropbox

Dropbox began as a single folder developed by co-founder Drew Houston so he didn’t have to email files to himself to work on them between home and school. But if file-syncing was useful for a college student, its utility in the workplace is even more obvious. When Dropbox got up and running in 2007, you had a work computer and a home computer. Today, you have a work computer and a home computer and a a smartphone and a tablet. And work happens on all of them.

But if Dropbox’s simplicity made it too tempting to pass up as software for work, that same minimalism made it an IT headache. Employees wanted to use Dropbox, and they found ways, even if the IT department hadn’t authorized it. And those departments often weren’t likely to do so, because Dropbox was so simple they had no way to control it.

Dropbox itself recognized this problem, and the potentially huge amount of corporate business it could capture by finding a solution. Last year, the companylaunched Dropbox for Business, which created a new work folder next to a user’s personal folder that IT managers could monitor and regulate.

Even that, however, didn’t meet the needs of truly big companies, ones whose head counts match the populations of small cities and have the bureaucracies to match. For them, the basic auditing tools and controls offered by Dropbox weren’t enough to meet the demands of their complex IT regulations, Fushman says. They needed the ability to customize how Dropbox worked, he says, which is where the new API comes in.

Splunk dashboard for Dropbox.  Dropbox

From the Outside In

By allowing other software to access Dropbox files and features through the API, the idea is that companies can put controls in place that go beyond what Dropbox alone offers. Dropbox says businesses will be able to monitor not just what files go in and out of employees’ Dropboxes, but what’s in those files, allowing them to keep closer tabs on issues of legality, confidentiality, and security.

Dozens of third-party software makers, from Dell and Cisco to HipChat and Trello, will have Dropbox-linked tools through the business API, the company says. Big-data analytics outfit Splunk, for example, will have a dashboard that lets IT see who is accessing corporate Dropbox files, what they’re doing with them, and from where.

As evidence that Dropbox is making its way deep into the corporate world, the company points to major customers like Hyatt, News Corp, and Under Armour. More than 100,000 companies in all now use Dropbox for Business, Fushman says.

Even so, Dropbox is hardly on its way to becoming the only way corporations share and sync files. Dropbox rival Box, for one, has focused on enterprise customers from the start, and it is now pushing hard to develop industry-specific products for fields ranging from healthcare to media. But that doesn’t detract from Dropbox’s remarkable trajectory. Today, Dropbox users have uploaded more than 35 billion documents made using Microsoft Office, the classic symbol of top-down IT. Dropbox is now also on the inside, but unlike its predecessors, it came from the outside in.

Questions raised over Queen’s ancestry after DNA test on Richard III’s cousins

Tests on descendants of last Plantagenet king point to ‘false paternity event’ and reveal he may have been blue-eyed blond

The bones of the king under the car park have delivered further shocks, 527 years after his death and more than two years after his remains were discovered in Leicester: Richard III was a blue-eyed blond, and the present Queen may not be descended from John of Gaunt and Edward III, the lineage on which the Tudor claim to the throne originated.

Five anonymous living donors, all members of the extended family of the present Duke of Beaufort, who claim descent from both the Plantagenets and Tudors through the children of John of Gaunt, gave DNA samples which should have matched Y chromosomes extracted from Richard’s bones. But none did.

Since Richard’s identity was proved by his mitochondrial DNA, handed down in an unbroken chain through the female line from his sister to two living relatives, the conclusion is stark: there is a break in the claimed line of Beaufort descent, what the scientists described as “a false paternity event”, which may also affect the ancestry of their distant cousins, the Windsors.

The other main finding overturns the most famous images of Richard, including the portrait head reconstructed from his skull that shows him with dark eyes and shoulder length dark hair. The analysis of his DNA gives a 96% probability for blue eyes and a 77% likelihood that he was blond at least in childhood.

Hair to the throne ... King Richard III’s revised portrait with new golden locks

There is no known contemporary portrait, but Turi King, the Leicester University geneticist who conducted the DNA research, said one in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries in London, made about 25 years after his death in 1485, showing grey-blue eyes and brown hair, probably comes closest to a true likeness.

Kevin Schürer, a genealogist and head of research at Leicester University, whose work with King on the ancestor is published this week in Nature Communications, said the results on the Y chromosomes, handed only from father to son, did not change history. “This is not a criminal investigation,” he said, pointing out that the Tudors took the crown because they killed Richard at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, not because they could prove the blood royal flowed through their veins.

However the Tudors did back up their claim to the throne through descent from John of Gaunt, son of Edward III and father of Henry IV – and ancestor of the Tudor dynasty through his legitimised Beaufort children after he married his mistress Katherine Swynford.

Although the Queen is descended from the Hanoverian kings, imported 300 years ago when the Stuart line failed with the death of the childless Queen Anne in 1714 and the Act of Settlement ensured that only Protestants could take the throne, the blood lines are entangled.

Mary Queen of Scots, mother of James I of England, was the cousin of Elizabeth I who executed her for treason, and both were descended from the first Tudor king, Henry VII. The Hanoverians were descended through marriage from the Stuarts through Sophia, granddaughter of James I and mother of George I.

Working out where the line from Edward III to the present Beaufort family was broken could only be done by exhuming a lot of bodies, Schürer explained – it took him 36 sheets of A4 paper taped together to demonstrate the family trees – and is not going to happen.

Nor will he be knocking on the door of Buckingham Palace looking for DNA samples. There are, however, at least two breaks in the line. The most significant would be if John of Gaunt were not the son of Edward III – which enemies suggested in his lifetime – which would affect the ancestry of the Tudors, Stuarts and Windsors, though Schürer suspects the break came later.

The five supposed cousins who gave their DNA are not descended from Edward III, or they would share Richard’s Y chromosomes, but one of the five is also not descended from the man who should be their more recent common ancestor, the 18th-century Henry Somerset, fifth Duke of Beaufort. “We actually went to his home and sat him down,” Schürer said. “It’s not the sort of news you want to deliver by email.” King said he had taken it surprisingly well: “It explained certain things in his family history.”

There is nothing startling about such rates of illegitimacy Schürer said, the estimated false paternity rate in any generation is 1-2%. Many contemporaries believed Richard’s brother Edward IV was illegitimate, and he declared illegitimate his nephews, the Princes in the Tower, to justify seizing the throne.

Richard left no direct descendants: his son Richard died before him, and a possible illegitimate son and daughter died childless. However Schürer’s research traced an unbroken line from Richard’s sister Anne of York to two descendants, researcher Michael Ibsen and researcher Wendy Duldig, born in Canada and Australia, 14th cousins twice removed but both living and working in London. The swabs King took from them proved a perfect match between Richard and Ibsen and a near perfect for Duldig – the oldest such successful identification.

They also looked at the possibility that the grave found in August 2012 held another man from the same date, of the right age, with battle injuries and scoliosis, and the same mitochondrial DNA. “What we have concluded is that there is, at its most conservative, a 99.999% probability that these are indeed the remains of Richard III”, King said.

Case closed, they agreed – though work continues on the DNA to extract more information about the last Plantagenet king.

The continuing research is mainly funded by the University of Leicester, with King’s post part funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Leverhulme Trust.

The skeleton found underneath a car park in Leicester in September 2012, now declared ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to be that of King Richard III, whose remains had been missing for 500 years

DNA Confirms: Here Lieth Richard III, Under Yon Parking Lot

The king's genes also raise some royally embarrassing questions about the legitimacy of the Tudors who ended his reign.

Researchers conservatively estimate that the chances of the skull at left not being that of Richard III (right) are 6.7 million to 1.

Ancient bones discovered under a parking lot have been confirmed as those of the medieval king Richard III, through a DNA test that also raises questions about the legitimacy of Henry VIII and other famous English royals.

Archaeologists had peeled back a parking lot in 2012 to excavate the skeleton, which was among buried relics of the Greyfriars Friary in Leicester, England, long the reputed burial site of Richard III. (See "The Real Richard III.")The team of genetics detectives reported Tuesday that DNA from the skeleton shows that the bones were Richard III's, with a likelihood of 99.9994 percent. This is the first genetic identification of a particular individual so long after death—527 years.

Most people know the hunched-shouldered king through Shakespeare's play Richard III, in which the maligned ruler utters such memorable lines as "Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this son of York," and "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

Earlier this year, a forensic study of the remains revealed that the doomed king—the last English monarch to die in combat—suffered 11 wounds at the time of his death, in a 1485 battle with the Tudors that ended England's War of the Roses

But there had been lingering questions about whether the skeleton was really that of  Richard III.

"The evidence directly indicates that these are the remains of Richard III," says geneticist Turi King of the University of Leicester in the U.K., who led the team reporting the results in the journal Nature Communications. (Related: "Richard III Mania: Understanding a Kingly Obsession.")

The scientists examined DNA inherited along maternal lines, known as mitochondrial DNA, from two distantly related modern-day relatives of Richard III's sister. That DNA is a near perfect match for the maternal genes of the hunchbacked skeleton buried at the friary. What's more, the DNA was "unusual," King adds, containing stretches that don't quite match anything in registries of European genes.

A statistical analysis led by David Balding and Mark Thomas of University College London took those genetic results and calculated the chances that a man of Richard III's age with battle wounds and a curved spine could turn up at Greyfriars and not be the slain king. They conservatively estimated that chance at 6.7 million to 1.

"It is surprising how many people initially argued that these skeletal remains weren't those of Richard III," says bioanthropologist Piers Mitchell of the U.K.'s University of Cambridge, who was not part of the study team. "Well, here it is."

In 2012 archaeologists peeled back a parking lot to excavate this skeleton, buried among relics of the Greyfriars Friary in Leicester, England. Photograph by University of Leicester

In 2012 archaeologists peeled back a parking lot to excavate this skeleton, buried among relics of the Greyfriars Friary in Leicester, England.

Risqué Royalty

However, Richard III's Y chromosome, which is inherited along the paternal lines, seems to have turned up some dirt on ancient aristocrats.

Because Richard III died without leaving any male heirs, the researchers had to trace his lineage back in time to find an ancestor of his who had inherited the same Y chromosome paternally and who had modern-day descendants. They found five men living today who are paternally descended from Richard III's great uncle, John of Gaunt, who died in 1399.

All five of those men should have inherited the same Y chromosome as Richard III through their more recent ancestor, the fifth Duke of Beaufort, who died in 1803. Thus they also should have the same Y chromosome as Richard III. Or so the researchers thought.

Yet none of the men had the same Y chromosome as Richard III, and only four of them had descended from the duke. This isn't too surprising, King says, given estimates of false-paternity rates, meaning "when someone's father is not who we think is their father."

The paternity problems don't shake the statistical probability that the Greyfriars skeleton belongs to Richard III, say the study authors.

But they say the Y chromosome finding "could be of key historical significance." False paternity in John of Gaunt's family could mean that Plantagenet kings such as Henry V had no genetic claim to their thrones. The study states, "This would also hold true, indirectly, for the entire Tudor line," including Elizabeth I and Henry VIII.

Still, the genes can't reveal exactly when the break in paternity occurred. And fortunately for today's royal-watchers, Queen Elizabeth IIdescended from a different family line.

Portrait of a King

The genes on Richard III's Y chromosome were unusual in English families and are seen more often in the Mediterranean, King notes, though Mark Thomas cautions about ascribing geographic provenances to chromosomes or genes.

Though the study doesn't say anything about the genetic health of Richard III, who was afflicted with scoliosis, it does say there's a 95 percent chance that he had blue eyes and a 77 percent chance that he had brown hair as a child. That closely matches his appearance in a Society of Antiquaries of London portrait from the early 1500s.

When this genetic evidence is added to all the other findings, including the shape of his back and the injuries he sustained in battle, Mitchell says, "now those performing Shakespeare's play about Richard III will have all the evidence they need to make it as authentic as possible."

Richard III's DNA throws up infidelity surprise

Analysis of DNA from Richard III has thrown up a surprise: evidence of infidelity in his family tree.

Scientists who studied genetic material from remains found in a Leicester car park say the finding might have profound historical implications.

Depending on where in the family tree it occurred, it could cast doubt on the Tudor claim to the English throne or, indeed, on Richard's.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

But it remains unknown when the break, or breaks, in the family lineage occurred.

In 2012, scientists extracted genetic material from the remains discovered on the former site of Greyfriars Abbey, where Richard was interred after his death in the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.

'Overwhelming evidence'

Their analysis shows that DNA passed down on the maternal side matches that of living relatives, but genetic information passed down on the male side does not.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

We may have solved one historical puzzle, but in so doing, we opened up a whole new one”

Prof Kevin SchurerUniversity of Leicester

However, given the wealth of other details linking the body to Richard III, the scientists conclude that infidelity is the most likely explanation.

"If you put all the data together, the evidence is overwhelming that these are the remains of Richard III," said Dr Turi King from Leicester University, who led the study.

Speaking at a news briefing at the Wellcome Trust in London, she said that the lack of a match on the male side was not unexpected, because her previous research had shown there was a 1-2% rate of "false paternity" per generation.

The instance of female infidelity, or cuckolding, could have occurred anywhere in the numerous generations that separate Richard III from the 5th Duke of Beaufort (1744-1803), whose living descendants provided samples of male-line DNA to be compared against that of the Plantagenet king.

Wendy Duldig and Michael Ibsen are 14th cousins, descended from Richard's eldest sister Anne of York

"We may have solved one historical puzzle, but in so doing, we opened up a whole new one," Prof Kevin Schurer, who was the genealogy specialist on the paper, told BBC News.

Investigation of the male genealogy focused on the Y chromosome, a package of DNA that is passed down from father to son, much like a surname. Most living male heirs of the 5th Duke of Beaufort were found to carry a relatively common Y chromosome type, which is different from the rare lineage found in the car park remains.

Richard III and his royal rival, Henry Tudor (later Henry VII), were both descendants of King Edward III. The infidelity could, in theory, have occurred either on the branch leading back from Henry to Edward or on the branch leading from Richard to Edward.

Henry's ancestor John of Gaunt was plagued by rumours of illegitimacy throughout his life, apparently prompted by the absence of Edward III at his birth. He was reportedly enraged by gossip suggesting he was the son of a Flemish butcher.

"Hypothetically speaking, if John of Gaunt wasn't Edward III's son, it would have meant that (his son) Henry IV had no legitimate claim to the throne, nor Henry V, nor Henry VI," said Prof Schurer.

Turi King says there is a greater than 99% probability that the body is that of Richard

Asked whether a break in the branch of the tree leading to the Tudors could have implications for the legitimacy of the present-day royal family, Prof Schurer replied: "Royal succession isn't straightforward inheritance from fathers to sons, and/or daughters. History has taken a series of twists and turns."

The breakage was statistically more likely to have occurred in the part of the family tree which does not affect Royal succession - the most recent stretch - simply because more links in the chain exist there.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

The lack of any match for the Y-chromosome lineage is quite curious and suggests an intriguing new avenue for dynastic DNA studies”

Prof Martin RichardsUniversity of Huddersfield

And Dr Anna Whitelock, a reader in early modern history at Royal Holloway - University of London, told BBC News: "It's important to note that Henry VII claimed the throne "by right of conquest" not blood or marriage - his claim was extremely tenuous.

"Henry VII was descended from Edward III from the Beaufort line - the Beauforts were legitimised by half-brother Henry IV but not in succession. Royal succession has been based on many things in the past: ability to lead troops, religion, connections - not always seniority by royal blood."

She added: "The Queen's right to reign in based on the 1701 Act of Settlement that restricted succession to Protestant descendants of Sophia of Hanover. A medieval false paternity does not challenge the current Queen's right to reign."

Blue-eyed and blond

Richard's maternal-line - or mitochondrial - DNA was matched to two living relatives of his eldest sister Anne of York. Michael Ibsen and Wendy Duldig are 14th cousins and both carry the same extremely rare genetic lineage as the body in the car park.

Richard III was defeated in battle by Henry Tudor, marking the end of the Plantagenet dynasty and the beginning of Tudor rule, which lasted until Queen Elizabeth I died childless in 1603.

Richard's battered body was subsequently buried in Greyfriars. As the Leicester team uncovered the male skeleton, the curvature in its spine became obvious. The condition would have caused one of the man's shoulders to be higher than the other, just as a contemporary of Richard described.

Genes involved in hair and eye colour were also tested. The results suggest Richard III had blue eyes, matching one of the earliest known paintings of the king. However, the hair colour analysis gave a 77% probability that the individual was blond, which does not match the depiction.

But the researchers say the test is most closely correlated with childhood hair, and in some blond children, hair darkens during adolescence.

The curvature in the spine of "Skeleton 1", later confirmed as Richard, was obvious during its excavation

The researchers took all the information linking the body to Richard III and carried out a statistical test known as Bayesian analysis to determine the probability that the body was indeed his - or not. Despite the absence of a male-line genetic match, the results came back with a 99.999% probability that the body was that of the Plantagenet king.

Commenting on the study, Prof Martin Richards, a population geneticist at the University of Huddersfield, told BBC News: "The work seems to have been done with great care and looks very convincing to me."

He said Richard III's maternal DNA type was very rare, and carried an additional genetic variant not previously seen before that "seems to be unique amongst a database that includes several thousand Europeans".

"So I agree that their assessment of the match probability is very conservative and it's very likely to be him," Prof Richards said.

He added that, given the apparent certainty of the body's identity, "the lack of any match for the Y-chromosome lineage is quite curious and suggests an intriguing new avenue for dynastic DNA studies".

Dr Ross Barnett, a specialist in ancient DNA at the University of Copenhagen, agreed that the work was "interesting and thorough".

Dr Barnett had previously raised questions over a preliminary analysis of the maternal-line DNA. But he told BBC News: "Now the paper is here and available for scrutiny, I have no further complaints. The team are excellent and I would expect the analysis to be robust."

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